Obviously a personal opinion, but Ansible solves this problem really well. It does get sluggish once we're talking about more than 50 machines, though. To reli

Obviously a personal opinion, but Ansible solves this problem really well. It does get sluggish once we're talking about more than 50 machines, though. To reliably end up with a working cluster: - spin up plain operating system VMs - spin up one more VM for Ansible instigator - collect the IPs, write them down to Ansible inventory - pull/upload your custom binaries - run Ansible playbooks to set the VMs up Sometimes it's beneficial to have a two-step process. One playbook to install rarely changing components. Then make a VM snapshot. The second playbook installs your custom binaries. Future installations can then start from the snapshot.